An embodiment relates generally to vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
Autonomous vehicle platoons, also known as convoys, utilize a common route planning among vehicles in the convoy for maintaining a formation among the vehicles of the convoy. The convoy consists of a leader vehicle and trailer vehicles wherein the trailer vehicles receive a guidance signal from the vehicle ahead of it for maintaining a path of travel. Such systems may utilize a sensing system to maintain a safe distance with the vehicle ahead. Each member vehicle of the convoy knows the route and destination in advance, and the location along the route at any given point in time. Such systems require a shared drivable route, such as a maplet with way points, speed, and other driver vehicle target tracking using a combination of sensors.
The drawbacks of prior art approaches are that the routes need to be known in advance. Prior art systems have relied on external positioning systems such as magnetic strips and GPS, and may also experience computational latencies caused by scene construction, simultaneous localization, and real time object detection and classification.